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Performance considerations: Virtual PC or Virtual Server

SunnyD

SunnyD

Belgian Waffler
I am in the process of fixing my domain after a hosed Exchange 2007 install, and am going to start virtualizing a couple subsystems.

My question is are there any performance considerations between Virtual PC or Virtual Server R2? My platform is Windows Server 2003 R2. Is either one or the other more lightweight or better performing than the other? And are there any other appreciable advantages to one or the other?
 
Just my $0.02: I use VMWare Server (and VMWare ESX Server, but that is not free). I've used it on Windows and on CentOS linux. On Windows, I'll say it does pretty good, the vms run *almost* as fast as being installed on native hardware. On linux however, it feels as fast as native. I would say even running two vms on a linux-bases VWMare Server feels almost as fast as native and this is on regular desktop hardware (P4 1.8ghz machines). 3 vms is still fast enough, but putting a 4th one one really dumped the performance.

On our ESX server's it's a different story. We have about 8 vms to a server and they all feel fast as native. This is on beefy multiprocessor systems though, which are expensive, and ESX Server is also expensive.
 
You may not be aware, but there are some nice licensing changes made for virtualization with 2003 R2. With a 2003 R2 Standard Edition license, you can use the same license for the host machine and one guest. With a 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition license, you can use one license for the host and up to 4 guests.

One thing about this that many people don't know is that these licensing changes apply to any virtualization technology, not just Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. So if you have an ESX server, you can "assign" a 2003 R2 EE license to the ESX box (even though it doesn't need to run 2003 on the host) and run 4 2003 R2 Standard or Enterprise VMs on it. You can also assign more than one license, meaning if you assigned two 2003 R2 EE licenses to a ESX box, you could run 8 2003 SE or EE VMs.

There's a handy virtualization licensing calcuator that helps you figure all this stuff out, definitely check it out:
http://www.microsoft.com/windo...ensing/calculator.mspx
 
virtual server would allow you to log out of the machine while the virtual machine is running. as far as i know, virtual pc won't let you do this.
 
Alrighty. I'm not using VMWare, so no big deal there. I may try it eventually, but not right now. Currently, I'm only going to do probably one VM and put my Exchange server on it - I know... you're NOT supposed to run Exchange in a VM... this is for a tiny network so it shouldn't have any performance considerations. I may do a second VM for SQL Server at some point, or a possible sandbox DMZ host, but not right now.
 
Originally posted by: SunnyD
Alrighty. I'm not using VMWare, so no big deal there. I may try it eventually, but not right now. Currently, I'm only going to do probably one VM and put my Exchange server on it - I know... you're NOT supposed to run Exchange in a VM... this is for a tiny network so it shouldn't have any performance considerations. I may do a second VM for SQL Server at some point, or a possible sandbox DMZ host, but not right now.
Click to expand...

How big of a site? This will definately work for smaller sites / home set ups (everything except the NAS is VMs here including the webserver and both domain controllers)
 
Originally posted by: stash
You may not be aware, but there are some nice licensing changes made for virtualization with 2003 R2. With a 2003 R2 Standard Edition license, you can use the same license for the host machine and one guest. With a 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition license, you can use one license for the host and up to 4 guests.

One thing about this that many people don't know is that these licensing changes apply to any virtualization technology, not just Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. So if you have an ESX server, you can "assign" a 2003 R2 EE license to the ESX box (even though it doesn't need to run 2003 on the host) and run 4 2003 R2 Standard or Enterprise VMs on it. You can also assign more than one license, meaning if you assigned two 2003 R2 EE licenses to a ESX box, you could run 8 2003 SE or EE VMs.

There's a handy virtualization licensing calcuator that helps you figure all this stuff out, definitely check it out:
http://www.microsoft.com/windo...ensing/calculator.mspx
Click to expand...

Whoa! Thanks for pointing that out Stash! I had heard about that, but it was after we had invested in ESX (plus I liked ESX better for other reasons) and I guess for some reason I figured it only applied if you use Microsoft's VM technology. So far, I've only transfered existing licenses (2000 server and 2003 R1 anyway) from physical boxen into vms, but this will be a bonus as we are planning to do massive upgrading to Longhorn server (I would hope they maintain that licensing scheme).
 
Originally posted by: bsobel
Originally posted by: SunnyD
Alrighty. I'm not using VMWare, so no big deal there. I may try it eventually, but not right now. Currently, I'm only going to do probably one VM and put my Exchange server on it - I know... you're NOT supposed to run Exchange in a VM... this is for a tiny network so it shouldn't have any performance considerations. I may do a second VM for SQL Server at some point, or a possible sandbox DMZ host, but not right now.
Click to expand...

How big of a site? This will definately work for smaller sites / home set ups (everything except the NAS is VMs here including the webserver and both domain controllers)
Click to expand...

yeah who says Exchange can't be in a vm? We run Exchange 2000, SQL 2000, linux/Apache, linux/MySQL, TrendMicro IMSS (email spam-filter gateway), and more in our vms. No domain controllers, but only because I haven't gotten around to migrating them yet.
 
this will be a bonus as we are planning to do massive upgrading to Longhorn server (I would hope they maintain that licensing scheme
Click to expand...
I hope so too, and I suspect they will, but I doubt that stuff has been really committed yet.
 
can someone point me to something that actually says that non-MS VM technology is okay to use when trying to use Windows Server 2003 R2 EE licenses on virtual instances?
 
Originally posted by: oog
can someone point me to something that actually says that non-MS VM technology is okay to use when trying to use Windows Server 2003 R2 EE licenses on virtual instances?
Click to expand...

First paragraph under the bulleted items on the last link I posted above.
 
Originally posted by: stash
You may not be aware, but there are some nice licensing changes made for virtualization with 2003 R2. With a 2003 R2 Standard Edition license, you can use the same license for the host machine and one guest. With a 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition license, you can use one license for the host and up to 4 guests.

One thing about this that many people don't know is that these licensing changes apply to any virtualization technology, not just Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. So if you have an ESX server, you can "assign" a 2003 R2 EE license to the ESX box (even though it doesn't need to run 2003 on the host) and run 4 2003 R2 Standard or Enterprise VMs on it. You can also assign more than one license, meaning if you assigned two 2003 R2 EE licenses to a ESX box, you could run 8 2003 SE or EE VMs.

There's a handy virtualization licensing calcuator that helps you figure all this stuff out, definitely check it out:
http://www.microsoft.com/windo...ensing/calculator.mspx
Click to expand...

WOW.....this is big....
 
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